proper-7-2020.md

June 21, Third Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 7): – Church of Our Saviour

Intractable difficulty of the gospel passage

The other day I was talking with the priest of another congregation about preaching on Trinity Sunday – which we observed two weeks ago. He said, “It’s one of those days in the year when you make a determined effort to find someone else to preach.”

Today’s Gospel passage presents another one of those kind of days. Really, if anybody finds the passage obvious or easy to grapple with I would welcome them to replace me.

Unfortunately, either they didn’t get in touch with me or I failed to reach out to the right people. Here I am.

First of all, this talk about a slave not being above a master – sounds too much like the pro-slavery arguments that have been wrested from the Bible for centuries. It makes me uncomfortable from the start.

The world-wide demonstrations that have been occurring these past few weeks makes me especially uncomfortable.

There’s a litany-like series of sayings from Jesus’ mouth that are breath-taking but also problematic to take literally:

• Nothing covered that won’t be revealed … – whoa, what does that mean?
• Fear – those who can kill the body and the soul
• Threat of: “whoever denies me …”
• Litany of how Jesus has not come to bring peace, has not come to reinforce the family – but perhaps to tear it apart. Set sons & daughters against fathers and mothers.
• Love mother and father over Jesus? …
• Finally the most straightforward thing: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

That’s not terribly comforting once you realize that for most of my life I’ve been on the side of those trying to find my life.

Jesus’ words are troubling, difficult to take at face value

“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

What does it all mean? What are we to make of it all?

Shall we just say that they add up to emphasizing that it is dangerous to follow Jesus? That if we are being faithful we will be persecuted?

Do we just pursue allegories and metaphors that allow us to skirt the biting nature of the passage?

One approach uses Clarence Jordan’s work to look for answers – the task is to move us out of our comfort zone. What seems familiar – what we think we know and take for granted – may well be deceptive.

Just to be clear: [the year is] 1942. You may be familiar with Jordan through his Cotton Patch translations of the New Testament or because the Habitat for Humanity movement originated from the Koinonia Farm.

[ … ] Jordan’s heroism comes through in his sense of humor. Once accused of fraternizing with Myles Horton, a reputed communist, Jordan retorted, “I really have trouble with your logic. I don’t think my talking to Myles Horton makes me a Communist any more than talking to you right now makes me a jackass.”

Likewise, when the Koinonia community tried selling peanuts from a roadside stand the Ku Klux Klan dynamited the stand. Stubborn like most saints for justice, Jordan put up another stand. It got blown up too. Finally, the Koinonia Farm resorted to mail-order ads: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.” [Clarence Jordan](http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx commentary_id=99)

I kept looking for other ways to enter into the passage. Somewhat surprisingly I found it by way of association with Father’s Day.

Fathers

Over the years I have not often focused on secular holidays. For one reason or another in Hawai’i I was often not preaching on Father’s Day – wasn’t preaching on this day in the lectionary cycle.

The cultural association with fathers follows a kind of fickle path – or maybe I’m just aware of the complex path of my relationship with my father. My relationship has included:

• idolizing him
• rebelling against him
• just being angry with him
• spending decades trying to earn his acceptance
• beginning to find a peace with him only after he died

Our culture has known a variety of attitudes towards fathers:

• When I was a child there were shows like Father knows best
• Then there were decades of fathers being portrayed as bumbling, self-centered, fools
• Currently, the TV series, This is us, has shown a nuanced portrait of a father who knows how to love, is flawed, worshiped, and idolized.

The figure of Abraham as we heard last week would become the father of many nations. The traditional term is Patriarch. It’s just Latin for “head-father”. We heard about Abraham and his wife, Sarah, and their promised son, Isaac.

This week Abraham’s relationship to women gains a spotlight. We only get a tiny snapshot, but the whole picture is huge.

The saga of Abraham in addition to his wife, Sarah, has a vital role for Sarah’s servant and slave, Hagar. And her son Ishmael.

These two took on a prominence in the Quran and related early Muslim literature. They play a role in the striking importance of the 2nd born in the Bible. Ishmael, you see, was Abraham’s 1st born son.

Hagar has a relationship with God that in some striking ways is closer and more intimate than any other person in the Hebrew Scriptures, certainly in Genesis.

Abraham is a father who binds us together in all our diversity. He is flawed, far from perfect, but a father who links together a great disparate family – the human family.

Abraham

Abraham is the father who provides me with insight in today’s Gospel.

Abraham makes it clear to us that we live by God’s gracious gifts not by virtues that we are able to muster.

Abraham calls us to a unity that seems so difficult for us. How is it that we prefer division, and house divided against itself? Abraham wept over the pain and division that he effected and he became the father of many nations.

I’m reminded of the old Jewish story about Adam. The student asks the rabbi, “Why did God create humanity from just one man?” The rabbi answers, “It was so that no one would ever be able to say, ‘My father is better than your father.’”

Abraham is the first of the patriarchs. Yes, father fought against son, brothers against brothers, and on an on it goes.

But in the end there is only one father, one “Abba”.

I place myself in the camp that says Abraham is the father that binds us together

Abraham has provided another lesson for me over the years. It encourages me to look deeper, to take a second, third, and fourth look. It encourages me not to rest on my assumptions. Abraham call us to look again –

You see, after years of reading the Old Testament, years of teaching from and about the Old Testament, it was only about 15 years ago that I was stumped by a question that came from somewhere. It could have been a Jeopardy ® question. “Who was Abraham’s second wife?”

Sure enough, I looked, and there it was in Genesis 25. Her name was Keturah. There are only 2 brief mentions in the Bible about her. But there it is. Something I didn’t know was there, would not have predicted, but real enough.

There are so many things like that in our lives.

Abraham can remind us that what we assume is true may not be so. We owe it to ourselves to look again, a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th time.

When we look again and again, the teaching of Jesus in today’s readings are about life-giving qualities of the Kingdom.

I put myself in the camp that understands Jesus’ words to –

• demand “Costly Grace”,
• demand accountability for the betrayals and failures we are prone to,
• knowing that the promise of “Abba” father will bring us to life in the end

It’s about New Eyes to see

With Abraham, I thought I knew what the story was about. From a young age I had heard the stories. I read the Bible as an adult. I taught the Bible as a priest. Yet it was a random question that caused me to cast out my preconceptions and assumptions, and to look deeper.

Not hearing or seeing what was there all along, I had missed the vital role of Hagar. The first woman to be on – as it were – a first name basis with God. She bore Abraham’s first child. God promised her in ways very similar to what God had promised Abraham. Hagar and her son are important. And their real prominence is only experienced in Islam.

Slavery and deliverance from slavery is an essential part of her story. The experience of being cast away, nearing death in the desert, and then fed and nurtured by God, these are a part of her story.

And she shares them with Jesus. It would seem we are called to follow in the footsteps.

Abraham leads me to be cautious about my own assumptions. And Abraham shows me that God makes straight lines out of our crooked scratching and wanderings.

Abraham leads me to a new way of seeing the Gospel itself.

In the kingdom, Discipleship is costly – Cheap Grace is no longer cost-effective. Gone are the days when faith was a comfortable affair – in my lifetime I have known many for whom their Christian faith was primarily an unchanging comfort zone. Bonhoeffer’s faith-filled confrontation with the evil culture around him is what gave us the term “cheap grace.” It was Jesus who proclaimed it first.

It really matters what we do or don’t do. Doing nothing is a decision nonetheless. There is accountability in the kingdom.

Great Reversal, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first – is in fact good news to those who recognize that they are but formed from the dirt of the earth, humus, and who know themselves in humility.

Tread lightly and softly as you look around you. Listen for the still small voice as well as the earthquakes. The signs of the times will be your guide, to lead you across the landscape of your calling.
Bless the Fathers.

proper-6-2020.md

June 14, 2020

Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6): – Church of Our Saviour & St. Paul’s

Old story about how “you can’t get there from here.”

Back in the 70’s there was a comedy team that produced a series of comic albums with the title “Bert and I”. They were set in the “down east” part of the country, Maine and environs. There was one story that I have not forgotten – largely because I have retold it from time to time.

A visitor is passing through town and stops to ask for directions. He receives a monologue that goes something like, “Waaall, ye go down here a piece and ya turn right at the big oak tree thaar, and the you go a ways …” After a series of such directions the voice says, “Ya know, come to think of it, you caaan’t get thaar from heeer.”

I thought of that story as I reflected on this week’s scripture readings and the gospel in particular. The church makes a gear shift change between last week and this week. We ended Trinity Sunday at the end of Matthew’s gospel. It is the Great Commission. Jesus has gathered his disciples and sends them out into the world to teach in his name and baptize new disciples and ends with a promise: “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”

We have followed a cycle of thematic messages that stretches from Thanksgiving to Pentecost – or better, from Advent through the Easter Season, up to Trinity Sunday.

It feels to me something like a symphonic piece where the orchestra works through a basic theme, with different instruments, different modulations, and so on. We have traveled from birth to inauguration of the work of the Messiah up through his final death scene and ultimate deliverance – that scene we saw last week where Jesus returns to a mountain top scene and delivers the great commission.

Today we begin a season of messages that lasts until Thanksgiving. It is in the most general way about mission, about Jesus’ mission, beginning in Nazareth. We follow for some months now, Jesus’ own ministry.

The general lesson for us is that we should follow in his footsteps, that his ministry is our ministry.

If we are sent on a mission, it is appropriate that we be com-missioned.

As I understood that commissioning, we are sent as a community, all of us together. We are not to divide ourselves between those who have it figured out and those who don’t, between those who are poor and those who are powerful, between those who are despised and those who have millions of followers on Twitter.

That gets me back round to where I started. With the story about how do we get to where we’re going? Can we get there going the route we’re on?

We thought we knew where we were going

For centuries we have figured we knew what that great commissioning was for.

It explained how it was that a rag-tag group of Jesus’ followers turned into a world religion.

We just understood that that Great Commission was about spreading the word of Christ – as understood by those who were spreading it – to those who hadn’t heard, didn’t know the word of Christ as we understood it.

It was the basis for colonizing the New World.

Ultimately it was the motivation for sending missionaries to Africa and for growing our churches year by year.

We have focused on numbers, success measured by growth, reaching the unchurched, converting the barbarians, … but I wonder about that story from Bert and I.

What if we couldn’t get to our destination by going on the route we had chosen?

Abraham

I think about how our first reading today and I wonder if it can give us clues about we go about this mission for which we’ve been commissioned.

The Genesis reading is about a person and a time far removed from Jesus’ time or ours. The person is Abraham. He had been visited by 3 strangers – aliens, some folks not from around here. They had a strange promise from God to pass on to Abraham and Sarah. So strange they couldn’t really take it seriously. Sarah laughed.

But Abraham opened himself to the promise because he welcomed those strangers into his tent. He offered them hospitality, though he had no idea what it was all about. He just knew that’s what he had to do.

The promise from God delivered by those 3 strangers was that Abraham and Sarah would have a son and through them their offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky, the grains of sand on the beach.

I guess that’s in part where we got the notion that our Great Commission is to increase our numbers.

My first important lessons about Middle-eastern hospitality came from my Old Testament professor in seminary. His name was Joseph Hunt. I think of him as a saint – but I won’t make this about him at the moment. He had lived and traveled among the Bedouin in the middle east and when he told stories about the power, the depth, and the importance of hospitality there, we believed him.

Hospitality was a quality of life there which very often meant the difference between life and death. Hospitality was more important than family feuds and war and peace between tribes and nations.

I learned about a similar approach to hospitality from a priest friend who thought that Wyoming was heaven on earth. [Well, there are some things about Wyoming that are pretty amazing – but this is not about Wyoming.] The people of Wyoming are proverbially fiercely independent. They go their own way and don’t treat fools kindly. Their nearest neighbor may live 20-30 miles away. But … there is a kind of fierce hospitality to be found in Wyoming, because the people there know that at any moment their life might depend on that neighbor.

Abraham offered hospitality to 3 strangers because he knew that it might well be strangers who would deliver the promise of God that would tell him where he was supposed to go.

I believe that God is like someone who would offered homemade chicken pot pie to a stranger. That may sound a little strange, but the thought that God would be at work in front of an oven and a stove, preparing a kind of meal for ordinary sorts of people – well that just makes perfect sense to me. I have like chicken pot pies since I was a youth. But I’ve only just learned in the past year that my wife makes the best chicken pot pie in the world. And she shared it with a virtual stranger the other day.

In heaven God serves Chicken Pot Pie – I’m sure of it – to strangers.

Jesus sent the 12 out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He said to go into the houses you meet and if they offer hospitality let God’s promise shine within it. If they don’t offer hospitality – well, just go on.

He commissioned them / us to pass on the good news – the Gospel – so that God’s grace is at hand and anyone witnessing would not want to miss it.

The Great Commission as I hear it is not about numbers, it’s not about balance sheets of some sort or another. It’s not about being the biggest and the best. It’s about recognizing that in 3 strangers from a foreign land may come the best news ever. It’s about embracing a promise that seems far-fetched and beyond anything but laughter – because it might well be God talking to us. Getting to our destination may well be like preparing Chicken Pot Pie.

A churning couple of weeks

These past couple of weeks our country has entered a kind of “George Floyd” moment. Folks that I know have either been unable to turn their eyes away from the news or have been so overwhelmed that they have turned the news off.

We have been commissioned. We, the church, have a mission. To our own country. Abraham’s radical hospitality can give us a clue about how to go about that. He knew that it was in what seemed outlandish and strange that God’s promise might well be found.

² Don’t neglect to open up your homes to guests, because by doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13

Abraham received the word of God through the strangers. Jesus’ disciples received it directly from Jesus. In both cases, the mission was to go out to make it known that God’s work of grace was always at work, for healing, for reconciling, for justice among the people. Jesus said:

‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.

One of the preachers this past week said that though we struggle and travail, God will prevail. You see he had read the end of the story.

The lion and the lamb lie down together. Isaiah.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? God to Abraham.

I have heard the message clearly these past few weeks. The destination toward which we travel is clear enough. It is to rest in the hospitality of God – I think of it as accompanied by Chicken Pot Pie.

There may be pain and suffering along the way, but we need one another for the journey. All of us count. None of us has all the answers.

The routes we have taken in the past did not work. They were not going to get us to the destination to which we have been called.

And the profoundly good news is that God will get us there in the end.

And our song is Hallelujah, Anyhow.

Notes

• lectionary – Proper 6
• Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) & Ps. 100
• or Exodus 19:2-8 & Ps. 116:1,10-17
• Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35—10:8,(9-23)

Abraham, Oaks of Mamre, promise, hospitality for 3 men, Sarah laughing, bore a son

justified by faith, while we still were sinners Christ died for us

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. … See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. … ” you will be persecuted

george-floyd-6-1-20.md

June 1, 2020

Minneapolis police chief says all four officers involved in George Floyd’s death bear responsibility - CNN

CNN report

As we tape this liturgy for broadcast in 6 days, we have no idea where the world is going to be. But we do know today that people from around the world have come together in solidarity to stand against the betrayal and injustice that was perpetrated on George Floyd last week.

The chief of police in Minneapolis said, “Mr. Floyd died in our hands and so I see that as being complicit,” Chief Medaria Arradondo told CNN’s Sara Sidner. “Silence and inaction, you’re complicit. If there was one solitary voice that would have intervened … that’s what I would have hoped for.”

Police officers around the world have knelt in solidarity with protesters. In a separate interview Sunday night, another police chief, this time from Floyd’s hometown, stood in solidarity.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told CNN he wants his department to provide escort services when George Floyd’s body returns to the city for his burial.

In my sermon for Trinity Sunday I take a perspective that is very broad — as if looking at the earth from the space station — and say that the time for division is past. Here, today, with my one small voice, I say, “The time when such injustice was ok is past.” Amos the prophet, thousands of years ago, said the same thing, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (5:24)

trinity-sunday-2020-monroe.md

June 7, Trinity Sunday: – Monroe

Celebrating a “doctrine” –

This is an unusual day in the Christian calendar. A day for celebrating and focusing on a “doctrine”, a “concept.” In the whole history of Christianity there are a few others, but none with the prominence of the feast of Trinity, occurring on the 1st Sunday after Pentecost. It has been observed in its present form at least since the 14th c.

In the church calendar we usually focus on persons – Jesus, of course, mainly; disciples; Mary; Paul; present-day witnesses and saints … the impact of our faith on us – but on this day – our focus is on a doctrine.

For many people it’s not easy to get excited about a doctrine. There is a pretty long and deep tradition to distrust rational doctrines and to prefer the personal, that which you can touch or feel.

As an illustration of that, I had a parishioner at my church in Michigan City who was at first perplexed by the doctrine of the Trinity. Then, ultimately she was put off by the logic and rationality of it. She firmly believed in God. She had a sense of who and what Jesus was and even the Resurrected Jesus living today. But to proclaim a “three in one” as somehow vital to being a Christian seemed bizarre to her.

She was exceptionally good with children and I was really glad to have her in the church. But ultimately she decided to leave because the doctrine of the Trinity just didn’t work for her.

The Doctrine itself

The doctrine grew out of a need to try to find words, to understand, to proclaim – the relationship between Jesus and God. Christians began to separate from Judaism because Jesus had touched them – you can read the record of that in the New Testament. The power, the grace, holiness of this person Jesus somehow had to be explained in relation to the holiness, the grace, the power of God. What the church came up with was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity.

Clearly the Trinity gets at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. But what are we to make of it?

The creed

The creed, whether it is the baptismal creed we used last week or the Nicene Creed we use this week – is Trinitarian in structure. The sign of the cross is by tradition accompanied with the words: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Baptism is: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

One major strand of the theology of the Trinity focuses on the use of the word “persons.” Trinity as: “One God in Three Persons.” This is probably the most familiar logical formula we’re accustomed to.

Without question the most difficult class I took in Graduate School at Notre Dame was a seminar on the Trinity, taught by Catherine Lacugna. ¹

Her magnum opus, God for us : the Trinity and Christian life, seeks to move our appreciation and understanding of the doctrine away from a rational and logical argument and to make it possible to experience the Trinity through our own personal experience of salvation through Jesus.

I’m not sure how much better I understood the doctrine of the Trinity after taking her course. I said last week that after all these years I don’t really understand the meaning of baptism better than I did in my youthful attempts to live up to the expectations of being a Christian. It’s been a lifetime for me of trying to live into the meaning of baptism. That is no less true of the Trinity.

I make the sign of the cross in the name of the Trinity. And I pray every day, utilizing the language and even I might say the shape of the Trinity. Do I understand it? I’m working at being a Trinitarian Christian. I’m certainly not arrived.

Possibly the best way to say what I’m trying to say here is through the words of an African missionary by the name of Vincent Donovan.

In a classic work (Christianity Rediscovered), he tells his story of being a missioner in Africa and about what he learned of God among the Masai of Tanzania.

As I was nearing the end of the evangelization of the first six Masai communities, I began looking towards baptism. So I went to the old man Ndangoya’s community to prepare them for the final step.

I told them I had finished the imparting of the Christian message inasmuch as I could. I had taught them everything I knew about Christianity. Now it was up to them. They could reject it or accept it. I could do no more. If they did accept it, of course, it required public baptism. So I would go away for a week or so and give them the opportunity to make their judgment on the gospel of Jesus Christ. If they did accept it, then there would be baptism. However, baptism wasn’t automatic. Over the course of the year it had taken me to instruct them, I had gotten to know them very well indeed.

So I stood in front of the assembled community and began: “This old man sitting here has missed too many of our instruction meetings. He was always out herding cattle. He will not be baptized with the rest. These two on the side will be baptized because they always attended, and understood very well what we talked about. So did this young mother. She will be baptized. But that man there has obviously not understood the instructions. And that lady there has scarcely believed the gospel message. They cannot be baptized. And this warrior has not shown enough effort…”

The old man, Ndangova, stopped me politely but firmly, “Padri, why are you trying to break us up and separate us? During this whole year that you have been teaching us, we have talked about these things when you were not here, at night around the fire. Yes, there have been lazy ones in this community, but they have been helped by those with much energy. There are stupid ones in the community, but they have been helped by those who arc intelligent. Yes, there are ones with little faith in this village, bur they have been helped by those with much faith. Would you turn out and drive off the lazy ones and the ones with little faith and the stupid ones? From the first day I have spoken for these people. And I speak for them now. Now, on this day one year later, I can declare for them and for all this community, that we have reached the step in our lives where we can say, ‘We believe.’”—Vincent Donovan, from Christianity Rediscovered

For Donovan, this story illustrates why the faith we are living into as Christians is not an individual sort of thing. It is not, as many have been taught, just about an individual’s relationship to God. Our faith is a communitarian faith. It is a community built on and with Love. It is our basic experience of the one God – a community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Believing vs. Doing

For centuries in the early centuries of the church a right understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity was the determining characteristic of whether one was on the right side of things. It was called orthodoxy. Orthodoxy was the thing that determined whether you were in the right party, on the right side of things. It never should have come down to that.

A way to understand this is as follows:

The earliest Christians experienced a new and powerful relationship with God through Jesus. It changed their lives. For centuries people could point to Christians as say, “See, he or she is one of them!” because of the lives they lived. It was the changed lives and the new and deeper experience of the Love of God that made these Christians distinctive.

Jesus, as we meet him in the New Testament, did not travel around Judea asking people if they believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He didn’t ask them, “What do you believe?” No, he said things like:

^{Matt 22:37} “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. ⁴⁰ All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

Divide vs. Bring together

It is the Trinity that is distinctive about Christianity. Baptism is incorporation into that Trinitarian community. One God is bound together in the love of three persons. The baptismal community is identified as a community of love.

We have had enough of focusing on what divides us. It is time to stake our lives on what binds us together. There is nothing that does that better than the Living God, creator of all that is and that shall be.

What makes us Christian is the evidence that others see that Christians “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” Where it is abundantly clear that Christians “strive for justice and peace among all
people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

It is the Living God who binds us together as one. The doctrine of the Trinity has the potential to overturn centuries of division and alienation – in the church, in our societies, in the human family that has been plagued with violence and slavery. Our baptismal faith as a Trinitarian faith has the potential to be transforming and unifying. It is time.

I dream of a time when the people of our land will look at a group of folks who bind up the broken hearted and who see common humanity where others see us vs. them – will look at this group of folks and say, “They must be Christians.”

We’re not there yet. Trinity Sunday can serve to beckon us to the reality St. Francis saw in his prayer:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
there is sadness, joy.

We’re not there yet, but we’re on our way, Lord. Thanks be to God.

Notes

lectionary

References

“Understanding the Trinity through the lens of love” Jun 23, 2011 by Thomas Gumbleton

“Trinity as Source, Word, and Spirit of Love: Relationship as Core of Reality” by Heidi Russell – LCWR National Assembly – August 9, 2018

---

1. Dale Hathaway’s note: The emergence and defeat of the doctrine of the Trinity. God’s economy revealed in Christ and the Holy Spirit ; The Cappadocian theology of divine relations ; Augustine and the Trinitarian economy of the soul ; Christian prayer and Trinitarian faith ; Thomas Aquinas’ theology of the Trinity ; The teaching of Gregory Palamas on God. Re-conceiving the doctrine of the Trinity in light of the mystery of salvation. The self-communication of God in Christ and the Spirit ; Persons in communion ; Trinity, theology and doxology ; Living Trinitarian faith. National Library of Australia ↩︎